They Shoot Divas, Don't They? Reviews

All this TV movie had to do was provide a halfway credible brand extension for the concert juggernaut that is VH1: Divas Live. (In fact, the film's title was changed to fit the franchise.) It's to the credit of director Jonathan Craven and up-for-it star Jennifer Beals, then, that They Shoot Divas, Don't They? emerges as such a delightfully campy trifle. Flashdance survivor Beals invests her Cher/Madonna-esque barracuda with realistic grit and not a whit of self-conscious parody, leaving it to the filmmakers and her varied co-star's to play up the story's Valley of the Dolls and All About Eve-esque dishiness. Keri Lynn Pratt never achieves the level of maniacal spunk that, say, Reese Witherspoon brought to bear in Alexander Payne's Election, but she's insistently perky enough to pull off her inevitable psycho transformation. Johnathon Schaech sleepwalks appropriately through his vapid hunk-with-glasses boyfriend role, while Traci Lords extracts the most wicked fun from her turn as a catty talk-show maven. Sending up the female-dog-eat-female-dog world of pop-singer superstardom doesn't exactly take a lot of exaggeration or skill, but making it go down this painlessly requires vision. If the results aren't art, well, they weren't meant to be; They Shoot Divas, Don't They? is pure entertainment.